A neurocomputational view of developmental stuttering

Abstract

An estimated 5% of children go through a period of stuttering around 3–5 years of age, with stuttering persisting into adulthood in approximately 20% of these children. Research into the neural underpinnings of stuttering have identified a number of structural and functional anomalies in various components of the left hemisphere cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical motor loop in children and adults who stutter. This talk will present the theoretical view that this loop is heavily involved in the initiation of speech motor programs (rather than encoding sensory-motor transformations that make up the motor programs themselves) and that stuttering is primarily a disorder of speech initiation rather than one of impaired motor programs for speech. Relevant neural and behavioral findings will be reviewed in light of this hypothesis, including findings that seemingly implicate audio-motor transformation difficulties in stuttering. In the current view, these latter findings are interpreted as evidence of difficulty in using auditory information to determine the appropriate time to initiate the next motor program in a speech sequence.